Martin Vallis

"To see we must forget the names of the things we're looking at"-Claude Monet


Some imagery has far more immediate impact, landscapes or portraiture perhaps and it's easy to understand why we connect with such.

But other images we simply don’t see because we don’t consider the subject to have any value.

My approach has always been to challenge that and show beauty/interest can be found in the ordinary, the mundane that’s all around us and that we walk by each and everyday without giving a second glance.

I’d like to ask you to take another look and allow your imagination to expand. See the beauty of texture, colour and shape that you might find in a piece of oxidising metal, peeling paint or decaying leaf.

I like to look at what I might consider to be ‘Art in my Environment ’ should you take a section of crumbling wall, frame it and hang it in a Gallery it becomes transformed and takes on a totally different meaning, does that make it of any less artistic value?

It's the same with images that are simple and the idea that “anyone could have done that” but in my experience “anyone” don’t do that and that I believe is the difference between the creative and non creative. Creatives do whereas non creatives don’t.

Simplicity also...

Studied Visual Communication Medway College of Art and Design 76-79.

Image: 'Private Eyes' (from Street Series) The Glasgow Gallery of Photography 4th-29th October 2023